Local Government

Service over systems – freeing the bureaucracy in public service

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Dr Philip Whiteman, Lecturer in Public Policy and Administration, University of Birmingham, explains what it takes to become a public servant today, in an environment free from rigid bureaucracy.

From civil servants and contractors to private-sector suppliers and NGO providers, anyone working in public service will know that it takes a different kind of mindset to keep services up and running.

 “Gone is the traditional view of the public servant as a bureaucrat, with a tightly defined job description and policy objectives. With organisations being far more organic now, public servants need to be more flexible to deal with the demands of difficult policy and public spending situations.”

Not only do public servants need to be able to adapt and negotiate their responsibilities, they also need to be entrepreneurial in their approach in order to respond to current external challenges.

As well as flexibility, today’s public servants also have to work co-productively with users and the community. The emphasis now is more on customer service and social justice than systems and processes. However, there’s a fine line between this reputable work ethic and the demands of the employer.

“There’s often a difficult balance to strike between serving the community and the demands of the direct employer, particularly if they’re under contract to government.”

Though public services will need to diversify to meet user expectations for more rapidly delivered, open-access services, the job will remain as crucial as ever. The demands of the state are likely to continue to be the same, but for public servants, there is a growing demand for varied skillsets and new ways of thinking.

To keep pace with this changing landscape, while simultaneously improving efficiency, digital tools, such as AI, will be essential components of the public servants’ arsenal.

“As the role of the state increases, spending doesn’t, so the state has to find solutions to meet the growing demand. So, I don’t see a shrinkage of the state, I see a rapid evolution in the way public servants operate within that environment.”

Despite the positive outlook for public servants, the transition to more sophisticated, yet more economical, services presents a number of issues. In environments where policies change rapidly, there’s little time for policy to be embedded in the organisation. Similarly, where leadership and teams constantly change, due to government instability or political interference, public services become more challenging to manage.

This issue can often become compounded through entrenched, inflexible systems and processes, as well as a reliance on consultancies with opaque motives. However, with the right management, these issues can be reversed. For example, bringing in ideas from other areas of public service, other sectors or other countries can often inspire new resolutions.

“Agile and resilient types of organisations are more able to adapt to current and future challenges, especially with the right leadership, culture and entrepreneurial vigour.”

To head off these challenges, tools and strategies are useful, but fundamentally, to succeed, public servants need a sense of responsibility to the community – in other words, a ‘public service ethos’. Other fundamental markers for successful public service include agility, integrity, accountability and a willingness to accept new ideas.

“It’s not just about the tools and techniques, it’s about the cognitive understanding and the culture of the organisation, and the public service community involved. It has to be a feature of people’s thinking, a view that it’s a positive set of themes for the future.”

For public servants keen to break free of bureaucracy and embrace new ideas, further study is essential. Backed by a postgraduate programme in public administration, public servants can begin to think more critically and autonomously about public services, helping them expand their remit beyond their current practices.

“Our Online Masters of Public Administration is geared towards helping the student become more a reflective practitioner, to improve their current practice as well as their career. Because by default, if they become better public servants in their existing career, they will become more attractive to employers in their future career.”

As well as unlocking highly transferable skills, the process of researching and examining new ideas and evidence can help public servants build the flexible, open-minded mindset they need to elevate their careers and make a genuine difference to the populations they promise to serve.

To find out more about the University of Birmingham’s Online Masters of Public Administration, click here. The next student intake: March 2020.

 

whiteman-philip

Philip Whiteman is a Lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies.  He has research interests in the impact of central government and regulators on the role, service delivery and performance of local government and other local bodies.  He is currently looking at developing a case for researching how guidance is an important instrument for steering local government over and above legislative instruments.

Planning and Politics: Opposite Political parties, same local economic development agenda?

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Milagros Gimenez

If you read Argentine newspapers or watch national TV news you might think that the political polarisation (left-right) in Argentina is extreme. Consequently, it is expected that this political polarisation translates to action, and that different types of public policy are designed that are strongly influenced by the ideology of the political party in charge. However, my experience working as a consultant in strategic planning in local governments in the North of Argentina suggests there are more similarities in the type of public policies than the literature suggests. To understand this seeming contradiction, I addressed this relationship in my master dissertation, submitted as part of the MSc Public Management at INLOGOV.

Argentina is a federal country divided into 24 provinces and more than 1300 local governments, and is one of the most decentralised countries in Latin America. After the last constitutional amendment in 1994, local governments have, by law, (defined in each of the provincial constitutions) a wide range of competences regarding not only the usual issues tasked at the local level (such as public street lighting and waste treatment), but also the promotion of the local economic development. Unfortunately, there is an incredible gap in the literature about the role of local governments in Argentina and an even bigger gap in our understanding of the role of local government in promoting local economic development.

My research explores what types of initiatives influence the extent to which local governments in Argentina promote local economic development and if, when an opposing political party is in charge at the local level, similar strategies will be carried out (shaped by the party ideology).

Interestingly, even though local governments have the competence to decide which initiatives they design, local governments are leading the local economic development (LED) area with similar strategic plans and almost identical initiatives. Local governments under comparison in this research have introduced initiatives to improve the employability of the population (labour supply) and for increasing labour demand using the municipal competencies, such as the use of land and creating new local sales channels. Moreover, the LED initiatives are, noticeably, identical; the Mayors‘ speeches communicate using a vocabulary similar to that of the political party to which they belong. These findings challenge the conventional idea that opposing political parties prioritise different public policies, an idea that is particularly prevalent in a country with strong party polarisation like Argentina.

Nevertheless, the next question is why how we can interpret these outcomes.

My research suggests four possible explanations, which can be the basis for future research. First, it could be that there is no political polarisation. Second, the cases may be outliers. Third, this may be a technical agenda rather than a political one. Fourth, and the most likely based on the evidence that I already have, is that local governments do not have `real` autonomy to decide LED strategy. That means LGs in Argentina in LED are not autonomous when it comes to the ‘real‘ distribution of power/competences/budget. With this in mind, LGs have two alternatives. First, they accept the LED initiatives promoted by other levels of governments or other actors. For example, public employment service was promoted at the national level and covers funding for the PES programme. The benefit of this is that these options are comparatively cheaper, as they involve investing only in human management resources. The downside is that local government does not have much influence on the initiative´s design and fewer opportunities to contextualise the programme to local needs (as the local economic development approach suggests). The second alternative is to develop and fund their initiatives. These initiatives are in general based on local strengths, for example close relationships with the local entrepreneurs.

In summary, this research provides evidence and valuable clues for further research about local governments’ room for manoeuvre in designing LED policies in a decentralised country such as Argentina and the relationships between politics and planning in a seeming polarised world.

Milagros Gimenez  is  an Argentinian economist, Chevening scholar and studying on INLOGOV’s MSc in Public Management. 

What if December 12th were repeated in the May mayorals?

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Chris Game

I’m not unrealistic.  I didn’t expect the Queen in the few hundred words written for her Queen’s Speech to chatter on that much about local government and councils – and she didn’t.  I did think, though, they might get some attention in the 150-page Background Briefing Notes.  But, no.  In the literally brief note on English Devolution (pp.109-10), ‘councils’ per se aren’t mentioned.  The search did, however, make me realise how crowded it’s going to be out there, as “each part of the country” gets “to decide its own destiny”.

The Government “remains committed” to the Northern Powerhouse, Midlands Engine, Western Gateway, and, I think, the Oxford-Cambridge Arc. The 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships certainly aren’t going anywhere soon.  Indeed, they may well be hoping to get their hands on the UK Shared Prosperity Fund that will replace EU Structural and Investment Funds. And quite possibly too on the PM’s own £3.6 billion Towns Fund, with, for starters, 100 Town Deal Boards, chaired “where appropriate” by someone from the private sector.

Then there are the UK Government agencies that Johnson wants to relocate out of London, with their existing civil servants or any who aren’t “super-talented weirdo” enough to pass the Dominic Cummings test.

The one democratic element of this increasingly crowded world that does receive more than a passing mention in the Briefing Notes are Mayoral Combined Authorities (CAs) and City Region Mayors, with talk of increasing the number of mayors and doing more devo deals. There weren’t many stats in this section, but one did catch my eye: “37 per cent of residents in England, including almost 50 per cent in the North, are now served by city region mayors with powers and money to prioritise local issues.”

With CA mayoral elections coming up in early May, I did a few quick sums. The current party split among the nine elected mayors, including London, is 5-4 to Labour.  The population split, though, is close to 3-1, with Mayor Andy Street’s West Midlands contributing over half the Conservative total.  And Street’s victory over Labour’s Siôn Simon in May 2017 was knife-edge: by 0.7% of the 523,000 votes cast.

I sense you’re ahead of me.  If, in the coming May elections, West Midlands voters were to return a Labour mayor, leaving Conservative mayors governing, say, barely one in eight of that 37% of residents, would a Conservative PM still be as enthusiastic about devolution to mayoral CAs?  We know for near-certain that Theresa May wouldn’t have been, but Johnson, as on most things, is less predictable. 

Anyway, it seemed worth asking: what would happen in the May mayoral elections, which include London this time, if everyone voted just as they did in December’s General Election?  Happily, Centre for Cities’ Simon Jeffrey got there first, so the stats are his, the interpretation mine.

First, though, a quick reminder of the broader context of those 2017 mayoral elections, and what’s happened since.  When Andy Street launched his bid for the West Midlands mayoralty, and even when he was officially selected as Conservative candidate, there looked like being only five of these new CA mayors.

Moreover, all five – Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield City Regions, Tees Valley, and West Midlands – might easily, given their borough councils’ political make-ups, have produced Labour ‘metro mayors’.  Whereupon, it seems likely that, to say the least, Prime Ministerial enthusiasm for serious devolution to metro mayoral CAs would have waned somewhat.

However, things changed. Sheffield’s election, following a dispute over the inclusion of Derbyshire local authorities, was postponed until 2018, and two far less metropolitan (and more Conservative-inclined) CAs were established – West of England (Bristol) and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough – just in time for the 2017 elections. 

With Tees Valley also going Conservative, Prime Minister May saw an initially possible 0-5 redwash turn into a remarkable 4-2 triumph – as reported on this blog. The political merits and possibilities of devolution, particularly to the West Midlands – bearing in mind that Labour overwhelmingly controlled Birmingham Council and formed the largest party group in five of the other six boroughs – suddenly seemed much more obvious.

Since then, though, the pendulum has swung. A reconfigured Sheffield CA and new North of Tyne CA have both elected Labour mayors, evening up the CA party balance at 4-4, but giving a score among the now ‘Big 5’ metros (populations over 1.3 million) of 4-1 to Labour, including Greater London Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Jeffrey’s sums show that Mayor Khan would be re-elected easily, likewise Labour’s Steve Rotheram in Liverpool.  In Greater Manchester, Labour’s Andy Burnham would be re-elected, but with a considerably reduced majority.  And the collapsing ‘red wall’ would have more than doubled Conservative Mayor Ben Houchen’s majority in Tees Valley.

And so to the West Midlands, which also saw plenty of “Red wall turning blue”, “No such thing any more as a Labour safe seat” headlines. It felt as if the Conservative vote had to be ahead, and it was … but by under 3,000 out of 1.18 million, or 0.2%! 

Yes, even replicating the Conservatives’ most decisive electoral win for a generation, it could be that tight.  And, if it were Labour’s eventual candidate who edged it, that would see Labour metro mayors as the elected heads of government in London and all four largest city region CAs, representing nearly a third of the English population. ‘Everything still to play for’ seems an understatement.

Chris Game - picChris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Socially smart cities: Making a difference in urban neighbourhoods

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Alison Gilchrist

The ‘smart cities’ movement has emphasised the contribution that technologies can make to tackling complex problems at the interface between urban institutions and the people who live and work in cities. Policy and funding has directed attention to issues such as traffic movement, air quality, social care provision, public participation, etc. within complex systems of micro-decision making and service delivery that need smooth and speedy co-ordination of demand and response. Using online or artificial intelligence, smart city models harness the latest technological developments to integrate information across a range of sources and to mobilise big data to broker diverse interests and deliver services on the ground.  But this is not enough to solve the major challenges facing many urban neighbourhoods.

Recent research in four northern European cities has revealed the crucial role played by ‘socially smart’ individuals working to improve life for the residents of challenging, but vibrant, neighbourhoods. These ‘smart urban intermediaries’ (SUIs) work with communities to devise ‘win-win’ strategies that tackle problems that both public authorities and private market forces find difficult to address.

The research team worked closely with forty individuals over nearly two years: observing their practice, exploring motivations and reflecting on some of the factors that enabled or obstructed their work. In many ways the SUIs are all different, with different motives and approaches, tailored to different times and circumstances. Nonetheless, they do have common practices and traits. The project compared experiences in similar neighbourhoods and found remarkable overlaps between how the smart urban intermediaries operate and what drives their commitment to social progress. Most have dedicated many years to improving the lives of the most disadvantaged residents of specific areas.  Two examples illustrate the courage and creativity of SUIs, using their networks to assemble the people and resources needed to improve life for residents.

In Copenhagen, a brave tenant led a campaign to rid her area of gangs openly dealing drugs and using knives and guns to threaten anyone who got in their way. She mobilised her neighbours through street protests and organised community actions to reclaim community spaces. The group also lobbied the police and city mayor to take more responsibility and to help residents to defend the neighbourhood against criminal activities.

Health problems among the Asian communities in Birmingham have caused concern for many years. A local initiative, the Saheli hub led by a community worker, has developed a range of fitness and adventure activities for women of all backgrounds to try out new experiences and challenges, such as cycling, running and kayaking.

The SUIs are passionate about improving life for their neighbours and challenging social injustices.  They nurture social relations and use these to bring together ideas, assets and expertise to develop projects that meet local needs and aspirations. This is possible because the smart urban intermediaries are trusted and respected. They invest time and effort in a web of connections with people who can provide advice, encouragement and practical help, often for free or very little financial cost. By working across sectors, traditional policy and institutional divisions, SUIs can be innovative, but sometimes struggle to maintain momentum because funding runs out, volunteers move on or they themselves experience ‘burn out’.

So, how can this vital, but hidden, role of SUIs be supported? Policy-makers and funders  might better recognise and respect their contribution to neighbourhood life. They might help to sustain the work of SUIs who are valued locally but struggle to make ends meet. And finally, they might invest in cross-sectoral initiatives that renew and align what is out there already. Smart cities rely on the latest technologies to enhance services and transform infrastructure. They also need socially smart urban intermediaries who understand local conditions and can spark community action around specific issues. Until that connection is made, smart city strategies will have a people-shaped void at their centre.

Alison Gilcrist

Alison Gilchrist is Research Fellow at INLOGOV as part of the Smart Urban Intermediaries project. Formerly Director of Practice development at the UK’s Community Development Foundation.

 

 

This blog originally appeared on the Smart Urban Intermediaries website. With thanks to them for allowing cross-posting. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and not INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.

 

 

The Need for Good Data: Challenges of Making Public Policy in Argentina and Venezuela

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By Milagros Gimenez and Gustavo Paniz

One of the aspects that most struck us as Latin American students while reading for our Master of Public Management at the University of Birmingham was the importance of having access to reliable data for making public policies. Current trends in public administration and the Evidence-Based Policy movement posit that the most efficient way to produce and increase the quality of public values ​​is through the rigorous and comprehensive use of “scientific evidence” (Head, 2017, p. 77).

Throughout our interaction in class with colleagues from diverse nationalities and backgrounds, we noticed that unlike other countries, a common characteristic of public administration in Argentina and Venezuela is the absence of reliable information regarding key economic and social indicators. During our dissertation research, we identified that this situation was not only due to a lack of technical or professional capacity but due to a deliberate intention of the ruling elites to hide and manipulate information in order to create narratives that support their political and economic interests.

In Argentina during 2007-2015, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government is said to have manipulated official statistics such as inflation and growth rates and directly stopped measuring poverty rates to hide the country’s serious social crisis (Economist, 2016; Lanacion.com, 2016). In Venezuela, the government stopped publishing the main macroeconomic indicators for four years to hide a hyperinflationary spiral that exceeded 1,000,000% in 2018 (Casey, 2018) reaching inflation rates similar to Germany in 1923 or Zimbabwe in 2000.

It is undeniable that distorting social and macroeconomic indicators causes irreparable damage to society because of the direct impact of indicators on public services. Without data it is impossible to properly target the coverage of services, the frequency of provision and ensure quality of service, for example. Thus, hindering the possibility of learning from practice, being accountable for performance and being able to research how to improve the services. The lack of data might provide insight and contribute to why countries such as Argentina and Venezuela rank among the most unequal countries in the world (worldbank, 2019). This inequality means in practice very few people have access to high-quality public service provision and most of the country experience insufficient access to basic public services. For example, in the author’s experience in their Argentinian home town, having stable electricity is the exception during the summer (where average temperatures reach 34°-40°C), and power outages and water supply cuts are normal. As there is no access to public data to report and then monitor this type of situation, holding people to account for these issues remains difficult and the situation continues.

As it was explained, public statistics with reliable information are the starting point to address any wicked issue (poverty and inequality being two important ones).  Restoring the system of statistical indicators is not a simple task but it certainly needs political will combined with technical capacity and organized civil society playing an active role in the supervision and control of the political system.

Milagros Gimenez and Gustavo Paniz are both Chevening Scholars and recent graduates of the INLOGOV MSc in Public Management.

The views in this blog are those of the authors and not those of INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.

Grassroots democracy in Syria: the experience of democratic confederalism

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Nathalie Colasanti discusses her award winning journal article:

When my coauthors and I started researching democratic confederalism in Northern Syria, we found that it wasn’t a well-known topic in the Western academic community; today, I’m sure most will have heard about it following the recent military operation conducted by Turkey across the Syrian border.

We carried out our investigation with the objective of raising awareness on this innovative, inclusive model which is based on three key pillars: grassroots democracy, ecology and women’s liberation. The difference between democratic confederalism and previous experiments with grass-roots democracy is that its evolutionary pattern aims to include heterogeneous local communities living in the same territories, with the objective of becoming an administrative model for the whole Syrian country, without shattering its national constitution. In fact, the evolution of the political and administrative system and the introduction of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria were specifically aimed at including all ethnicities and not focusing on the Kurdish population only. Democratic participation is ensured by the bottom-up organisation of the administrative model, which is based on communes (the most “local” level, usually the size of a village or a neighbourhood). These are autonomous in decision-making and self-organisation, and they coordinate through various levels of higher administrative and federal structures. The main idea of democratic confederalism is that the commune is the democratic centre, and higher institutions tend to serve as coordinating structures. The continuous educational work led by activists, aimed at commune residents, allows them to overcome the “democratic problem” according to which the people are not educated and conscious enough of their choices to positively participate in direct democratic processes. In fact, the structure of democratic confederalism allows them to eliminate the disconnection between participatory practices and formal decision-making forums as the two coincide and participation results in decision-making.

Another very interesting aspect is the role of women and the principle of dual leadership, according to which any leadership position has to be jointly held by a man and a woman. Moreover, a 50% presence of women is mandatory is any assembly or committee. In parallel with people’s assemblies and councils, there are women-only councils at all organisational levels, which are responsible for any issue regarding women. Thus, women’s self-determination is truly possible, and their participation is motivated by the acknowledgement of their previous marginalisation.

Democratic confederalism provides an innovative model that is based on participation to decision-making and the centrality of the local, grassroots level. Democracy is defined as an element that is organic to society, that shapes every aspect of organisational and administrative institutions and that is practised on a daily, continuous basis by all those who want to be involved. Everyone can participate to democratic processes and decision-making in their communities, and in fact the greater the participation, the more the common interest for effective and representative decisions is reached. The experience of Northern Syria overcomes limitations linked to the lack of inclusion in participatory experiences, as everyone is encouraged to take part in decision-making. At the same time, democratic confederalism presents itself as an alternative public management system, providing interesting insight for reflecting on the current crisis that democracy is facing at a global level.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support provided by UIKI Onlus (uikionlus.com), the Italian Office for Information on Kurdistan, in helping me to access first-hand data and interviews.

nathalie1Nathalie Colasanti is a post-doc researcher at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her research interests include public management and governance, the commons, workers’ self-management and platform cooperativism. Her article, with co-authors, Grassroots democracy and local government in Northern Syria recently won the prize for best article of Vol 44 of Local Government Studies, by an early career researcher.

 

 

 

 

 

The views in this blog are those of the author and not those of INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.